Shariq’s Département

Chabrol, that French master of sinister characters and situations has created a nasty, insidious movie in “La fille coupee en deux” now playing at the IFC, and I don’t mean that in a bad way.

At the center of the film is our heroine, Gabrielle, an ambitious TV weather woman (reference to Kidman’s “To Die For”?), played by the beautiful Ludivine Sagnier (who was also in “Les Chansons D’Amour”).  But, unlike Kidman, Gabrielle is one of those characters who you want to just shrug out of their stupor.  She is courted by two men, one a famous older man, the other a slightly unhinged millionaire playboy, both of whom are obviously not right for her, yet she makes incessant bad decisions, allowing herself to be used again and again.

This is where the insidious nature of the movie comes in.  It is full of unlikeable characters who use one another.  The playboy, Paul, played by Benoit Magimel (remember him in “The Piano Teacher”) is the more obvious nutcase, with hints of violence from day 1.  But what is unnerving about the movie, is that the learned, elder writer, played by Francois Berleand ends up being even more of a user and abuser, when, near the end of the movie it is revealed what he makes Gabrielle do on her birthday before dumping her later that night by simply changing his locks.

At some level, the movie, aside from being a satire of French social classes and the literary scene, is a commentary on feminine assertion in the context of sexual objectification by men.  Gabrielle knows that men want to sleep with her and she wants to use this to her advantage.  But she allows her feelings to creep in and always wants to please and give up her own needs for the other.  Hence, she opens herself up to being exploited.  There is a lesson here of being on your guard always and putting your own needs first, not those of others. 

I am reminded of another classic movie about female sexual subjugation between two men: “The Piano” starring Holly Hunter, set in Victorian era New Zealand.  Here, a mute woman, totally defenseless, given her position in a foreign, frontier society asserts her needs from the beginning of the movie, both sexually and in terms of her music.  Her will and belief in herself allows her to weather all kinds of challenges.  Gabrielle would do well to look her up and learn from her approach to life.

The insightful documentary Up the Yangtze, playing at the Quad cinema, uses the creation of the Three Gorges Dam in China to explore changing aspects of Chinese daily life.  Peasants who are forced to move from areas being flooded must seek alternative forms of income to support themselves in a post-Communist economy where cash instead of a paternalistic communist government handout is necessary to survive.  Meanwhile, foreign tourists from the US, Canada and France are crowding tour boats along the Yangtze river to see this disappearing world before the flooding occurs. 

The movie documents the attempts of two young Chinese teenagers learning to work on these ships.  For the girl, Cindy, from an extremely poor family, she has to work and give up high school to support her peasant parents who are illiterate.  We watch her struggling to come to terms with the reality that she must forgo an education to feed her parents; the film juxtaposes images of fat American tourists gorging on plates of heaping buffet food to make the point that we live such wonderful lives in the West that we cannot imagine the difficulties others go through in the developing world just to survive.  I’d recommend you see this movie just to remind yourself that no matter how bad your life might seem to you, you have it pretty good!  One American woman leaving the cruise at the end of the movie congratulates a young Chinese aide/porter for not being as “obtrusive” on her cruise as she had feared.  She has a lot to learn.

The movie reminded me of another film about the Three Gorges Dam I saw a couple of months ago, the excellent Still Life, directed by the very talented Jia ZhangKe. 

This movie won the best picture prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and is successful in using the Dam to explore what the meaning of change is for two different protagonists: a man who is in search of a wife who left him many years ago, and in a parallel story, a woman who comes to the Three Gorges area to seek her husband who is involved in constructing a new bridge across the Yangtze.  The images in this movie are as real as the ones in the documentary (pre-flooding), and one almost thinks that the two movies must have been shot at the same time. 

But what is really interesting in Still Life is that Jhangke suggests that although change is occurring in China, people feel like they are trapped in a limbo as they wait for a future to arrive, not knowing what form it will take.  A pre-dam life has ended, but where do the people go from here?  The male protagonist is shown to be the wiser one, as he silently accepts life and seeks new possibilities when life does not go his way, accepting that the future will reveal itself in its own time.  The woman protagonist is more limited, struggling and crying as she realizes she has lost her husband, bewildered at fate’s hand.  She is stuck in the limbo, as probably many are in China, the movie suggests.  The movie is filmed in washed out colors and has many long takes, suggesting the faded, meandering quality of a life that is changing but is arrested, and has not yet fully birthed the future.